Tag / shrimp

Many many years ago, before the existence of this website and when I was still a student in the States, we took a super long road trip down to New Orleans for spring break. It was a beautiful city with quite a bit of culture, and it was also the first time I had Louisiana style seafood, with crayfish, shrimps, and those really distinctive sauce.

A few weeks ago, I had the same type of seafood treatment for the second time of my life, right here at PJ SS2’s Crab Factory.

Crab Factory at PJ SS2

Crab Factory has been in existence for almost 3 years now, situated just right across the road from McDonald’s in the busy commercial area that is PJ SS2. Parking can sometimes be a challenge at this area, especially on a Monday night when Pasar Malam is in full swing. Which isn’t really a problem since Crab Factory smartly chooses Monday to be their rest day.

menu with price list on the table, and on the wall

The restaurant is tastefully decorated with very practical table arrangment fit for group and couple dining as well. For those who are worried about going out of hands in terms of budgeting for a seafood feast, the prices are well written on the wall, in the menu, as well as their website at crabfactory.com.my

brown crabs in signature southern bang sauce

The ‘standard operating procedure’ when it comes to a shell-out type of restaurants like this is a little bit different from the conventional seafood restaurants many of us are familiar with. There’s no fork & spoon, chopsticks, or even gloves.

crayfish/yabbie in zesty lemon, shrimp with garlic butter

The seafood is poured onto your table that is laced with a giant piece of food grade wax paper. You then use your base hands to feed these delicious sea creatures right into your mouth ala caveman style. Quite a fun experience for most, but you’d want to make sure the nails are clean prior to dinner.

For a restaurant this size, the seafood selection is rather impressive. There are various types of crabs such as brown crab, king crab, spanner crab, and meat crab. Then there’s normal lobster, red lobster, and slipper lobster. You want shrimps? They’ve got tiger prawn, white prawn, freshwater prawn, and amaebi. Then there’s baby octopus and several types of shellfish as well.

brown crab set

If you can’t choose, the easiest way to start is with one of their sets. Such as the crab set we tried. In addition to your choice of crab, the set come with king white prawns, yabbies, hamaguri clams, NZ green mussels, scallop in shells, and baby octopus.

Additionally, there’s also sweet corn, chicken sausage, potatoes, french beans and shallot rice. These are the stuff that will help fill up the stomach a bit if you don’t want to overindulge yourself to way too much seafood (like we did this session)

brown crab set, mussels, and more shrimps (spicy plum sauce)

We sampled quite a variety of offerings from Crab Factory. The crabs were really fresh, big, and very juicy. The white shrimps tend to soak up seasoning very well, while baby octopus is perhaps just a tad slightly more cooked than I’d like it to be, but I think they stay quite true to the Louisiana style.

As for the sauces, I found myself enjoying the Signature Southern Bang sauce quite a bit, but my favorite has got to be the with the butter garlic sauce, which I think let you really taste the sweetness of seafood.

good times, and extremely full stomach

Overall it was quite a fun experience, the only problem I had was trying to operate the camera while eating with my bare hands (many trips to the water basin).

If you want to treat yourself some out-of-the-norm seafood feast, this is certainly a worthy option.

Now most of you have already tasted clay pot chicken rice, but did you know that there are ingredients other than chicken being thrown into the pot with rice and cooked the same way? Well I didn’t, not until the biofuel expert Kelvin told me about Busy Corner.

these guys are serious about their food

Busy Corner was pretty busy on the weekday night we went, but the restaurant is located in the middle of the shop row, not at the corner. At Damansara Jaya near KDU College, this place is also just a couple hundred meters from another very good clay pot chicken rice place near Atria.

For the five of us, we ordered a big Prawn clay pot rice, a big Beef clay pot rice, and a small Chicken clay pot rice. A couple plates of boiled bean sprouts and lettuce served as the provider of vitamin C and iron, and we ordered some pretty good herbal soups too.

beef, prawn, chicken, and two vegetable dishes, yumm

The prawn clay pot was pretty different from what we have accustomed to, they are completely shelled and cooked in something akin to Thai sauce, a little spicy, but not overly done. I like the fact that the meat on our black pepper beef clay pot was not overly cooked, making them still succulent to the bite. As for the chicken, it was on par with the other places I have reviewed on this blog. All three main dishes came with raw onion on top, which was a pretty unique touch.

The steamed soup we ordered were pretty good too. I noticed little chunks of dried scallop in my herbal chicken soup, very nice.

Busy Corner is just a stone’s throw away from KDU

With the rice, soup, vegetables, and drinks, it came to slightly over RM 17 per person. Not on the very cheap side, but certainly not overly expensive considering what we ordered.

It was at the beginning, a plan to head to the famous PantaiSeafood at Kayu Ara. However, when we got there the whole place was all booked up, Kelvin the food expert then suggested that we go to this fairly unknown Restaurant City Star instead. Trusting the guy and his taste, especially after we went for the Kampung Atap curry fish head lunch, we agreed right away.

Comprising of two standard shop houses, the restaurant isn’t exactly very impressive on its size nor its interior decoration. Just a basic and clean setting with half the restaurant air-conditioned (non-smoking area). One thing I like about City Sun Star though, is the way they attach pictures on most of their menu item, giving the patrons an easier time ordering from the extensive selection of dishes. But since Kelvin was with us, we let the expert do the job.

The selection was spot on, the crab was really good, firm and meaty, obviously very fresh. I found myself unable to stop licking the salted egg yolk off the shells. The Marmite prawn came de-shelled except the tail, but since it was deep fried, we just chew and ate the whole thing. The tail became crispy and actually tasted very nice, providing a contrasting texture.

tofu was pretty good, we cleared all the plates eventually

The Thai style fish was deep fried with Thai sauce and lotsa garnish, reminding me of the Thai style chicken I had at PJ Old Town. I also especially like the combination in the vege dish, there were long bean, okra, petai, and kacang botol (winged bean), fried with sambal and some onion. Last but not least, the tofu did not dissapoint either.

this is how you get to City Star at Taman Bukit Mayang Emas

The bill came to RM 177.14, with the biggest item being the 3 big crab costing RM 70 and the other dishes and drinks making up the rest. It was defintately worth it, for only about RM 25 per person to have such quality and well prepared food.

It’s been a while since yours truely posted some wholesome healthy dishes that you too can make at home. Here is the latest invention of the KY herbal soup that I am quite sure, no ordinary chef will serve at any decent restarants, enter the KY’s herbal glass noodle soup.

glass noodle, herbal soup, chicken, shrimps, yumm..

So here are the ingredients:

a pack of herbal soup.. er.. herbs

a piece of chicken breast

some pork ribs

some shrimps

two portion of glass noodle

some garlic

half a chinese cabbage

Simple enough isn’t it? Now here are the steps:

First pre-boil the ribs seperated in a small pot

Remove the ribs from small pot and put it in a bigger pot, boil this with the herbs

Let the herbal soup simmer in a low fire for at least an hour

Boil the shrimps and chicken breast (cut into pieces) with some garlic in a seperate pot

At the same time, add some Chinese cabbage to the herbal soup, add some salt accoreding to taste

After the shirmps and chicken are about cooked (only takes a couple minutes), add in glass noodle

Cook for another couple minutes, then remove the water and empty the good stuff into serving bowls

Finally, add herbal soup with vege and ribs into the bowl that already has glass noodle, chicken, and shrimps

are you hungry?

This is just about as wholesome a meal one can get in a dish. Seafood, poultry, meat, vegetable, all in the rejuvenating herbal soup. I had some red chilies in soya sauce on the side too. It’s all pretty simple to make, impress your girl friend, or mother in law, or something..

By the way, the ingredients were not really chosen by design, though they ended up mixing well and being absolutely delicious. Cheers!